Sometimes that treasure is just far as a phone call to the customer care department.

Sometimes it is just a click away in the Q&A and/or Forum section of our site.

And sometimes it's just there, freely offered by our own competitors to everybody able to retrieve the correct information from them.

Understanding what our audience is really talking about, what the specific language is that they use, and what their topics and themes are can be easier than we may first think.

Be aware that I don’t mean that extracting useful information about our audience is easy – that would be trivializing the audience targeting work – but I mean that nowadays, thanks to the social nature of the web, it is much easier finding valuable sources from where retrieving information than just ten years ago.

For this reason, as I already said in
my previous post, I asked the editorial team at Moz to let me analyze one year of Moz Q&As, with the purpose of identifying what the community was most frequently talking and asking about, and what they discussed most often, and so trying to paint a better portrait of the community itself. Finally, I wanted to offer the Moz team insight that can help them offer a better experience to the users.

I don’t know if was able to understand the “100 most asked questions,” as Rand asked, but the method I used, and that any of you can refine, is the correct one for offering that kind of list.

The Method

The first thing I did was
extract from the Moz database the following information related to questions published in the Moz Q&A between May 1, 2013, and April 28, 2014:

The ID number of the questions (this is extremely important, because the same question may be published to a maximum of five categories and because, yes!, there are questions that are 100% identical in their phrasing);

The date each question was asked;

The URL for each question;

The question itself (labeled "Title");

The number of answers to each question;

The number of thumbs up obtained by each question;

The categories to which the questions were assigned

From the database extract, it was not possible to retrieve other very important information, such as:

The number of views (I had to manually scrape this information, as I don't have direct access to Moz's Google Analytics);

The Real category (I had to look those up manually and add them to my speadsheet)

You are probably asking, "What is the real category?"

In the case of the Moz Q&A, the "real categories" are those that include the actual categories. They are a upper taxonomy level, which is shown to the users when they are asking a question, but not when filtering the questions:

The "real categories" are necessary information, because they help organize the questions into very recognizable macro-topics.

In order to quickly and easily understand topics,
I decided to use Wordle to create word clouds. Wordle has the great option of letting you hide words that complicate your analysis, letting you focus on the relevant words.

Finally, to understand what the questions were that really mattered to the Moz community in the analyzed time-frame,
I followed these simple consecutive rules:

Questions with more views matter more than questions with less views;

Given the previous value, questions with more answers matter more than questions with less answers.

I didn't take into account the number of thumbs up of the question as metric for the simple reason that very rarely is a question thumbed up. My decision would have been different if I was also taking into consideration the answers.

For a more refined analysis, then, I'd recommend also considering the number of "Good Answers" and the presence or absence of a "Staff Endorsement."

What other tools did I use for conducting my analysis? None but Excel.

Moz Q&A bird's eye view

Between May 2013 and April 2014, 26,775 questions were published in Moz Q&A, but if we eliminate the duplicates from those that were published in more than one category, there were
11,555 unique questions published.

First problem: Which number should I consider in my analysis? The raw number of questions or the one including the duplicates? The answer was easy: the raw number.

The reason is that it is impossible to understand what a user was considering to be the "main category" when publishing their question in more than one category; therefore any choice I would have taken would be totally subjective and so void the analysis;

In certain cases, though, I preferred checking the de-duplicated list as well, in order to confirm my first impressions.

What are the Q&A users talking about?

The word cloud is quite clear. The Moz community is:

Obsessed with Google;

Composed mainly of SEOs (SEOs, Site, Ranking, Link...);

Asking primarily on-site questions; and

Interested in content, but not as interested as it is in relation to SEO (as we will see later).

This is even clearer if we see how many questions have been asked during the 12 months I analyzed:

We can easily see how "The SEO Process," which includes all the categories directly related to SEO in the Moz Q&A, stands far above all the others.

If we hide the "The SEO Process" questions, we can better understand what the other macro-topics Moz users are interested in are:

Q&A is also the space where Moz users can publicly ask questions to the Help Team about the Moz Tools, and that specific nature of this category explains why "Moz Products" is the second most-popular topic in the Q&A.

Then, two different but equally important points emerge from this graphic:

Despite the tireless efforts in evangelizing inbound marketing, the "Online Marketing" category, which includes all the inbound disciplines but SEO, is not really performing well in Q&A, as if the users (mostly SEOs) were still too worried about classic SEO issues;

"Local Marketing," a category that was only created in January 2014, has quickly reached an interesting volume of questions. This could be telling us that Moz did well creating Moz Local, because local search marketers are an important percentage of the Moz users.

Be aware, then, that the decrease in the number of questions we see in the charts is not due to a diminished interest about SEO by the users, but—as described in my previous post—to the design of the Moz.com site in comparison to the old SEOmoz.org one.

Digging into the data

The SEO Process

The SEO Process category comprises seven subcategories.

On-Page / Site Optimization (3,967 questions) and Technical SEO Issues (4,118 questions) are almost tied in the first position, which is clearly indicating to us how
classic SEO still is the most important source of doubts for the Moz community.

A reason for the success of these categories, confirmed by the third position of Intermediate & Advanced SEO, could also be the increased difficulty of technical SEO, which has a steep learning curve—especially for the new generation of SEOs coming from the marketing/communication fields and not engineering/computer science.

Content & Blogging, which could be considered the "content marketing" side of the SEO Process, is only fifth, after the supposedly dead Link Building.

The Vertical SEO and Keyword Research categories are the last ones, and while we can consider Keyword Research somehow as a smaller topical niche by comparison to much wider ones like Technical SEO, it's quite surprising to see how questions about vertical searches (news, videos, images) are not so common. Sure, Local Search, which was the most important vertical, now has its own macro-category (Local Marketing), but nevertheless I was quite surprised.

In this Wordle related to The SEO Process category, I omitted the word Google, because it was dwarfing all the others in the word cloud, making the analysis difficult.

Looking at the word cloud, it is almost obvious that Moz users are especially concerned with these topics:

Duplicate Content

Duplicate Pages

Duplicate Site/Website

Links/Backlinks

If we associate the topics, we can understand that
two big fears are constant:

Panda (which, curiously, is not called out explicitly in the questions);

Penguin.

User are coming to the Moz Q&A in order to find help for their penalized sites
(drop, dropped, penalty, disavow, problem, manual...) or because they have understood their site is at high risk of penalization, or because they really have to make explicit its indignation.

Link Building

I want to start with the Link Building subcategory because it is a very good example of what I've just said above.

I removed the words "Link" and "Links" for better visibility of all the other words.

What doesn't emerge from the word cloud is the frequently viewed and commented
questions about tools, usually link analysis tools for Penguin recovery (i.e. Link Detox, Cognitive SEO).

In general, the sensation is that the users asking questions are usually
new to thelink building practice. A constant trend, though, is evident: people ask for creative help because they are working on so-called boring niches, or because they are dealing with niches usually dominated by spammy link building practices. This trend should make all us reflect when writing about link building, because we tend to write as if everybody was dealing with big brands and big budgets, when clearly it is not so.

Another useful exercise is seeing how very specific topics return over and over in the Q&A. Obviously, for this very granular kind of analysis, it would be better to also have the question in the dataset, and not only its title.

Let's take "Penguin" as an example:

The spike we see in October coincides with the rollout of Penguin 2.1, and confirms
the importance of Q&A for feeling the pulse of our audience almost in real time. For this reason, using tools like Fresh Web Explorer for monitoring our keywords' mentions in our own Q&A is essential in order to spot hot trends and eventually creating very timely content.

Finally,
there's a word that I totally missed and that, IMHO, should be one of the most relevant ones in the words cloud: outreach. And there are very few questions and discussions about strategy, too, which is making me very sad.

Technical SEO Issues

This is the king of all the categories of the Moz Q&A. And it is quite ironic, because if in the SEO-blog world technical SEO is losing visibility for other topics, at the end of the day the most common questions asked by SEOs are about the most classic of the SEO subjects.

But what are the topics that worry the Q&A users the most?

Duplication issues, and the related canonicalization issues, seem to represent a big portion of the SEOs' worries when it comes to Technical SEO. Another classic cause for concern is a site's migration.

And, clearly, SEOs are worried about optimizing their site for Google (I feel sorry for Bing, but this is the real world).

The presence of "Links" and link-related words is partly caused by the liberty given to users to publish questions up to five categories, therefore many questions that should fit almost exclusively in the Link Building subcategory are present also in the Technical SEO Issues one.

That said, there are also a good bunch of questions related to
internal linking, especially in relation to information architecture, budget crawl management and no-indexation of duplicated pages.

We can also find quite a few questions about
"Why is my site not indexed by Google?"

A smaller but relevant amount of questions surround
Technical SEO issues generated by the most common CMS platforms (Wordpress, Magento, Drupal, and Joomla), and, apart from Wordpress, this is the kind of topic that is not taken into much consideration in the Moz and YouMoz blogs.

Finally, classic evergreen topics are
htaccess and regular expressions: Maybe Moz could think about a specific cheat-sheet or even creating an htaccess generator better than the ones already available online.

The quality of the questions and answers, then, is higher than the Link Building one, even if it is still big the number of "newbie" kind of questions.

On-Page / Site Optimization

The On-Page / Site Optimization is the second most-used category in all Moz Q&A, but this data is strongly influenced by the fact that users tend to categorize their questions in both Technical issues and SEO On-Page / Site Optimization.

For this reason, in order to better understand what exclusively can be attributed to this category we must de-dupe the questions. The result is something like this:

The topical landscape we see is showing us how
users still tend to think of on-page / site optimization in terms of keywords and related keyword-centric topics (i.e. Title tag).

Quite surprising is seeing how a hot topic like
semantic search is barely present; we almost don't see words like schema, semantics, structured data et al.

One of these two things is likely correct:

Users do not have any problem with Semantic SEO (and I do not think so); or

Semantic SEO is still in an "early-adopters" phase (and this is what I believe).

If we analyze our Q&A sections to finding new ideas, then this "absence" should aim us toward creating better and more understandable content about semantic search, so as to educate our audience and be consistent with our mission.

Intermediate & Advanced SEO

This category suffers from the same problem as the previous one; users tend to categorize things as Intermediate & Advanced SEO questions that really should be attributed to other categories.

For this reason, if we do not make a conscious de-duplication effort, the topics seem to be essentially identical to other categories.

The
problem, then, is not being able to provide a clear definition of what is meant for Intermediate & Advanced SEO. Without defining this clearly, the concept of "advanced" totally depends on the SEO education grade of the users who are asking questions, and what emerges quite clearly is that the Moz Q&A public generally is not really advanced.

But if we decide that advanced stands for questions that experienced SEOs may also find difficult to answer, than we can see
interesting topics:

Ecommerce sites tend to be the most difficult ones to handle with from an SEO perspective;

Duplicated content and canonicalization questions, even if the most basic questions are omitted, are still the most asked, especially in relation to product pages and blog posts/categories/tags;

Robots.txt, noindex and the nuanced uses of rel="canonical" can result in a sort of puzzle that is difficult to be solved;

Information architecture, site structure, and crawlability tend to be asked almost exclusively in this category.

A
special mention must be made for infinite scrolling, parallax design, and SEO for Ajax in general, which are topics that can be discovered as relevant to the community only if we consider metrics like page views and number of comments.Their popularity and level of of engagement, then, is confirming to us that there's a space in the Moz Q&A for really advanced SEO questions; the problem is keeping them from sinking into a sea of basic SEO questions.

Content & Blogging

The questions present in this category represent how
SEOs look at content:
as a method of ranking better.

This could lead to a discussion about how much SEOs have really understood the importance of Content Marketing (and blogging) as an inbound tactic for making your site/brand relevant for the users, and hence able to earn popularity, shares, and links, and not just another SEO task for ranking better on Google.

That's not to say that the Moz users aren't aware of the real meaning of Content Marketing, but they still struggle to understand its effects on SEO. Good examples of this attitude are found in these two questions:

All this also explains why the most popular questions are related to the SEO
technical side of content optimization:

Rich Snippets

Indexation of non-HTML content (i.e. PDF files)

Authorship

Indexation and Duplicated Content

Or, to content creation for link building (i.e. guest blogging, good or bad?)

Keyword Research and Vertical SEO

These are the Cinderellas of The SEO Process category.

This is due to their very specific nature. A nature which is very clear to all users, and that means that we don't find replicated topics like duplication or canonicalization, even if they still are present.

Online Marketing

As I have told before, the Online Marketing category included all the Inbound Marketing disciplines except for SEO.

What emerges from the word cloud, though, is how
the unofficial title for this category should be “How to use other Online Marketing disciplines for SEO.” The outstanding presence of Google and, secondly, of SEO, is telling us just that.

Nine subcategories are present in the Online Marketing category:

As we can see, the interest SEOs have for any single discipline determines the ranking of these subcategories. This explains why Social Media ranks first, immediately followed by Web Design, while a discipline like Email Marketing is ranking in the last position (tied with Affiliate Marketing).

The poor performance of Affiliate Marketing is telling us that the SEOs working in that niche are not substantially part of the Moz community, or that they don’t consider Moz as their site of reference.

What we can conclude is that
Moz is mainly used by SEOs who use other online marketing disciplines in a wider Inbound Marketing strategy, but their main focus is the relation between those disciplines and the SEO process, more than specifically about their intricacies.

A last observation we can do is that the Moz community is very practical and looks for tools that can make their professional life easier or for tips about how to better use the tools.

Social Media

Let’s give a look to the Social Media words cloud:

Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are the social media platforms people are asking about most. Social networks like LinkedIn or Instagram are present, too, but their presence is almost symbolic.

Google+ is the most cited social network by far, and this should not surprise us if we remember how SEOs compose the vast majority of the Moz users and the importance Google+ has for SEO.

The analysis of the questions about Twitter shows almost the same trend, but there are some that really could be taken as example of my theory that SEOs ask questions, such as
this question that asks if the same content tweeted by two different accounts could be considered duplicated content: No social media marketer could have even imagined asking this.

Web Design

It should not surprise us that Web Design is the second most asked-about online marketing discipline. Aside from the timeless love/hate relationship that SEOs have with web designers, the evolution of Google and the increasing importance of correct web development for SEO performance explains it.

In this word cloud I purposely deleted words like
Google, Design, and SEO in order to better see the real topics users discuss in this subcategory.

Site speed and performance optimization emerges as a third topic if we examine the questions more deeply.

Generally, though, again we see SEOs asking questions and many times they categorize as Web Design questions that they also asked in some of the subcategories of The SEO Process, which may indicate to us that many users are convinced that, for instance, the duplicated content issues are somehow related to a poor design of the site (when, maybe, they should look more at information architecture).

Online Marketing Tools

I think the correct name for this category should be "SEO tools:"

If we look at the questions, and take into consideration also views and answers, what we see is that
the vast majority of questions are directly related to the SEO process.

The only Online Marketing discipline that emerges with some force in this SEOed landscape is
Adwords. Instead, we have a very small and dispersed presence of questions about tools for Social Media (which comes third as topic) and other Online Marketing areas.

Is this a sign that SEOs:

Know about the importance of the others Inbound Marketing disciplines, but don't deal directly with them?

Or that they deal sporadically with those disciplines, therefore don't feel the urgency of using specific tools for them?

Other Online Marketing categories questions analysis

The remaining six online marketing subcategories generated fewer questions than the three previously described (1,019 vs. 1,291 questions). Moreover, many of their questions could be considered duplicates from other categories.

Some of these Online Marketing subcategories, then, generated less than 100 questions:

Affiliate Marketing > 54 questions;

Email Marketing > 56 questions.

A special mention, though, must be given to Paid Search Marketing and Internet Advertising:

We easily see how AdWords is dominating the attention of the users, but we should not forget the emerging importance of Native Advertising or Social Advertising for Link Building purposes.

Measuring & Testing

Aren't we saying all the time that SEO and Inbound Marketing are data-driven Internet Marketing disciplines? Yes, and search marketers are aware of the importance of measuring and testing, but nevertheless this category has only 1/7 of the questions that "The SEO Process" has (2,127 questions vs. 16,015).

Five subcategories are present:

The
evident decline of Reporting over time made me wonder, could the reason behind its decline in interest be due to the fact that Moz users were asking questions in this category about the Moz Pro / Moz Analytics reporting functions? Once Moz created a better Moz Product category in Q&A, almost all those questions disappeared from Reporting.

The chart seems to confirm and reassure us that the users of the Q&A are data-driven folks.
But is it telling us the real story?

The answer is:
not really.

This word cloud is clearly telling us that
"analytics" is a synonym of Google Analytics for the Moz users.

Moreover, the great relevance of the word
Traffic should alert us. In fact, if we examining the Analytics questions one by one, we will discover how very frequently users refer to Google Analytics just because it was the tool that showed them a loss in organic traffic. Users, then, tend to publish these questions also in some of the most popular subcategories of The SEO Process category.

Again, the freedom given to the Moz users is making difficult to retrieve unique information on a subcategory level.

All these questions hardly find an answer in other sections of the Moz site, but clearly
they manifest a need. Maybe is it time for creating a very practical Google Analytics Implementation Guide or Cheat Sheet?

Research & Trends

Personally, this is my favorite Q&A category. Why? Because in it we can find questions about international search, alternative search sources, and a space for discussing the most advanced trends in search and everything related to audience targeting.

We could define it as a category devoted to strategy, but that doesn't forget to translate it into concrete tactics.

Unfortunately not so many Moz users feel the same enthusiasm: In these 365 days, they asked only 1,319 questions in this category, half of them limited to the "Search Engine Trends" subcategory:

Search Engine Trends

What are the Search Engine Trends Moz users discuss?

Personally I already imagine the answer, but let's check to see what the word cloud tells us:

If we look directly at the questions, what we observe is how
Search Engine Trends is practically a synonym for penalties, and—let me tell you openly dear Moz community members—penalties are not a Search Engine Trend.

Only three questions about Knowledge Graph have been asked in 12 months. Four about Hummingbird (two of which by people convinced Hummingbird penalized their sites!). A topic like Personalized Search—which should be talked and asked about here—is completely absent.

Something is wrong here. Probably the Search Engine Trends subcategory is just another category users classify their questions for because they have this option. Or, maybe, Moz (and I count myself in) still has not being able to create the right awareness about the importance of being constantly updated about how search engines are evolving.

Or Moz users simply are more interested in finding immediate answers for very practical needs; and if it is under the aspect of tips and tricks better.

International Issues

This subcategory is substantially different. In this case, almost all the questions are really on topic and very specific, as is made clear by viewing the word cloud:

I am surely biased, but the International Issues subcategory is the best example of what a Q&A category should be: clear in its nature.

The other Research & Trends questions

I must admit that when I saw the word cloud of
Alternative Search Sources I laughed a lot:

GOOGLE?! Alternative search source?!

In seriousness, apart from this obsession with the Big G, it's interesting to notice the presence of Bing, Yahoo, and the very few questions about Baidu, Yandex, and Naver (only two!). It's clear that Moz users are spending 99% of their time on Google and only allocate a very tiny amount of time to other search engines. It is also clear that SEO outside of the classic American-focused search engines is not something they are concerned about (probably because they are not dealing with it).

Finally, if you return to the chart with questions asked in the Research & Trends category, it is interesting to see the
strong decrease in questions about Behavior and Demographics. Why? Because people aren't really asking questions about those topics, and the biggest percentage of the questions classified as Behavior and Demographics are what I've defined as "duplicates" of other categories.

Community

Community is a Q&A category mostly meant as a space for discussing topics about the inbound marketing industry, not one where people ask for help.

Seeing that the only topic within Community that really matters to the Moz users is White Hat / Black Hat SEO is quite depressing, but it reflects the worries SEOs have for practices like Negative SEO or penalizations for spammy link building tactics that have been used in the past.

And those same topics dominate the other subcategories, which are not formally about spam, link penalizations, and negative SEO:

It's certain: we can find words like
Mozcon and Articles, but they are just few words between many not relevant ones.

If I was Moz, I would seriously reconsider this category.

Business Development

The Business Development has a very multi-faceted nature where the common denominator is the practical life of a search marketer. This being the nature, a subcategory I wish were here is one about how to deal with clients:

The questions present in this category, then, seems to suggest that it's a
category mostly used by independent SEO consultants or owners of small SEO companies.

This may explain why only 504 questions have been asked in Business Development.

But, despite the small number of questions, this is the category with the
highest ratio of answers per question: 4.47

Local Marketing

Local Marketing is a relatively new macro-category; it was created on January 2014.

Despite being new, it has been able to attract the attention of the many SEOs specialized in Local Search:

Local Strategy, Local Listings, and Website Optimization for Local Search are the most-used categories, and this interest is also reflected in the word cloud:

What surprised me was (finally!) seeing "schema" present in the word cloud.

It turns out that how to use Schema for local search is quite a hot topic that is able to create great engagement,
like in this question.

The Moz Support Q&As

A
Q&A section, at least in Moz's case, is also a place a company can use for offering customer service.

Aside from the obvious benefits, a great
advantage of using Q&A for this purpose is that the company itself can collect useful data about their own products perception, weakest points and needs the users are expressing.

Initially, the support side of the Moz Q&A was limited to two categories (Moz Products and Pro Application), but during this last twelve months Moz rationalized the questions creating a taxonomy based on the different areas of Moz Analytics (Search, Social, Links, and Brand Mentions) and stages of learning the tool. Finally, specific Q&A categories were created for all the other tools owned by Moz (Moz Local, OSE, Followerwonk, APIs).

The chart above speaks for itself:
the tools users are most concerned with are the ones more strictly related to classic SEO functions:

Search

Links

Other Tools (which includes tools like the Keyword Difficulty Tool, the Rank Tracker and the Crawler test)

What a clear confirmation of what has been repeatedly said in this analysis:
Moz users are SEOs, maybe adopting inbound marketing as a way of thinking, but ultimately SEOs.

For this reason, we can say that the partial return Moz is doing onto focusing again more on SEO practitioners, even if under the inbound marketing philosophy, is very well justified by the composition of its audience.

Not that other inbound marketing facets of Moz Analytics are not considered useful, but they are not considered as essential as the SEO ones.

One thing, though, clearly emerges from analyzing the Support Q&As: the strength and participation of the Moz community itself. In fact, the biggest percentage of the answers given to these questions are from Moz users.

Conclusions

The analysis of the Moz Q&A tells us many interesting things about the
Moz community:

It is composed in its majority by SEOs;

A big part of the community is represented by SEOs who are beginners or have an intermediate knowledge of SEO itself;

Advanced SEOs tend to ask fewer questions, and when they do, it's usually in very defined niche subcategories (i.e. international issues);

The Moz community is generally proactive: only 2,120 over 11,555 questions (de-duped count) didn't received fewer than two responses.

Notwithstanding point 4, fewer than 500 were able to generate an ongoing discussion (10+ answers)

Moz users look for and appreciate more concrete actionable tips than discussions about the whys of search strategy;

SEO dominates and influences every Q&A category, and this means that:

Inbound Marketing seems considered as a new framework where SEO is included, but SEO substantially seems considered as having the same functions it had before.

The analysis—to conclude this gigantic post—is telling us something we all need to reflect on: inbound marketing still hasn't put solid roots in the minds of search marketers, and despite what the biggest majority of the Moz community says publicly, it seems it's still thinking in terms of the old classic SEO.

About gfiorelli1 —
Gianluca Fiorelli loves to be known as father of two wonderful sons and luckily married to a great wife. He's a professional SEO, who will always consider himself an eternal student. He's a Strategic SEO & Web Marketing Consultant operating in the Italian SEO market , but he operates also internationally - offering International SEO Consulting with IloveSEO.net. You can find Gianluca on Google+ and Twitter.

Gianluca, you've done it again! Great post. Just some thoughts on the conclusions:

It is composed in its majority by SEOs;

This makes sense because Moz used to be, well, SEOmoz. And many digital marketers got their start by doing what has been called "SEO."* But I would posit that the community will be comprised of fewer "SEOs" (by percentage) in the future as so-called "SEO work" expands to include nearly everything "digital marketing." Then, as the more and more human activity takes place online, "digital marketing" will just become "marketing."

So, I would predict -- with absolutely nothing to back this up -- that the Moz community and the "SEO world" in general will consist less of "SEOs" and more marketers and communications specialists in general. The next logical step would be that the content, posts, and questions here will be less and less about "SEO" and more about marketing, advertising, and communications in general over time.

Or I could just be wrong!

A big part of the community is represented by SEOs who are beginners or have an intermediate knowledge of SEO itself;

This also seems logical -- everything is a pyramid. A high number of beginners at the bottom and a few number of experts at the top. Not everyone can be a thought-leader like Gianluca. :)

Advanced SEOs tend to ask fewer questions, and when they do, it's usually in very defined niche subcategories (i.e. international issues);

Also makes sense. The longer that one works in digital marketing, the more that one will learn all of the "101 level" stuff. Then, to advance further, one needs to determine in what areas he or she is lacking and then go deep into those niches.

For example: As a former journalist who first learned traditional marketing before "SEO," I know strategy and writing and content. But I know very little about coding beyond the HTML that I taught myself. So, I ask questions about that niche -- advanced website code. But that's just me -- everyone will be different.

The Moz community is generally proactive: only 2,120 over 11,555 questions (de-duped count) didn't received fewer than two responses.

Random idea for Moz: Quora checks and suggests other questions that may be the same as one's question before it posts. Perhaps Moz could implement something similar to cut down on duplicate questions and ease your server load?

Notwithstanding point 4, fewer than 500 were able to generate an ongoing discussion (10+ answers)

I'd suggest that 90% of the great discussions happen in post comments and not in the Q&A because people there are looking for fast answers, not ongoing discussions.

I'd attribute that to psychology. No one wants to appear foolish and look like he or she does not know something. (But I'd say that the mark of actually knowing a topic in general is admitting when you don't know something specific.) So, the questions come out when one is panicking.

Moz users look for and appreciate more concrete actionable tips than discussions about the whys of search strategy;

A thousand times this. Whether it's at conferences or in the Moz Q&A, people generally don't want to hear yet another alleged "thought leader" profess to have figured out "the next big thing." They want to hear things that they can use tomorrow (as in the case of conference speakers) or in the next five minutes (as with Q&A).

SEO dominates and influences every Q&A category, and this means that:

Inbound Marketing seems considered as a new framework where SEO is included, but SEO substantially seems considered as having the same functions it had before.

Here's where I sort of disagree. When someone says that "SEO" dominates every category, what does that actually mean? In my opinion, SEO* is just a collection of best practices. It's doing web-dev well, content well, social media well, PR well, conversion optimization well, and so on. Almost anything that we call "SEO" actually has a pre-existing name. Also, I'd say that what we call "SEO" is the result of good web-dev and marketing. "SEO" is not something you do.

* That's why I usually put "SEO" in quotes -- I personally hate the phrase.

As you know, we agree almost in everything, but I agree to disagree about your last notes.

When I say that SEOs dominates and influences every Q&A category, I mean that every topic in the Q&A is filtered from the SEO point of view:

Content and Blogging >> Why my content is duplicate? Why now Google is against guest blogging as a link building tactic? How can I deal with products' description copywriting in order to avoid Panda? What kind of content can I create for a Concrete Industry site, which is boring like hell, so to obtain some few links?

Those are the questions we can find in that category, and not: What content strategy to use for earning better visibility toward our audience? How to repurpose content in a crossmedia strategy? How to hire technical writers for creating content that matters? Long-forms or chewable forms? What do you think about Hupwhorty/Buzzfeed style, could be re-used for other kind of site?

And you can see that trend in every category.

So, that's why - in my last conclusion point - I say that SEOs (which is the main audience of Moz still) - ultimately is:

1) knowing very well that SEO has evolved and that now cannot work so well as before without collaborating with other online marketing disciplines;

2) but still is thinking about those same "inbound sisters" in term of SEO advantage, and not in really holistic marketing view.

My conclusion, then, marries well with a more generic perception I have from what I read, hear and see from many SEOs: that a big majority of SEOs thinks that SEO and Inbound Marketing are synonyms, hence that everything digital marketing ultimately is nothing but SEO.

I'm not saying that in the Moz audience you don't find other kinds of marketers, but they still represent a minority respect the search marketing ones. So, I think it is good what Moz seems doing since a few months now: creating content about everything Inbound and still evangelizing the Inbound Marketing philosophy, but returning quite consistently creating content for SEOs. AKA: Moz seems taking as its mission not targeting all the Inbound Marketers Audience, but transforming old SEOs into a more evolved Inbound Marketers SEOs.

I have 106 questions which have been marked as Good Answers in the Moz Q&A section over the last few years and probably have a few hundred more which I answered. I should by now be on the Moz Payroll hehe =) But really it is good to give back to the SEO community when you have some spare time. It would also be good too see some data exacted from Moz Google analytic's to show which questions drove the most organic traffic top 20 for example that shouldn't be hard to extract right?

Actually, that was a data I asked the Moz team for, but time first (this post was originally previewed for publishing last months, but then the analysis itself suggested to create a more technical first part) and others duties then (as solving the issues created by the constant DDOS attacks Moz is suffering), made it impossible to obtain them.

On the other hands, the "views" data is something coming directly from Google Analytics, but Trevor Klein can solve the doubt if it means "sessions from organic" or "page views".

To the best of my knowledge, the views that are shown on the page don't segment by source, so it would be total views of that page. Good call on doing a quick study of the questions that drove the most organic traffic, though!

Well algorithm updates are always going to cause a spike in Q&A depending when they launch, same with Moz products. I am interested to know what types of questions drive traffic on a year round basis. This way I can develop more content around it ;) That is one section I like from Rand's yearly round up is the section about which blog posts were the most successful for the last 12 months.

Hi Gianluca, great and cloudy post :) Maybe it would be interesting to show my similar conclusions with a moz scraping search with g docs.. I just scraped about 3000 questions.. even if i got the shares, thumbs and answers data as well, i just discarded it as i thought words in questions were more influent for the goal (which are the most common questions in moz q&a) than the number of replies or thumbs up .. My results were pretty close to yours in regards with duplicate content questions. Using an online tool for kw density measurement then of the 2600 questions analyzed, my results are showing a few more points:

1. Google is the most common questioned term.

2. "How to" and "How do" are the most questioned expression.

3. Google Analytics is also a common expression in questions.

4. Page, Links, Content, (my) Site, SEO, Moz are also common words used (the most used)

Ques No. 11,556: Gianluca, how many months have you taken to analyze these questions and write this post? :)

But frankly, this is an amazing study of yours (and your team) as now we can see where we stand as a community (SEO). What tactics are followed by majority of people? What tool are favored by them?

As far as I can understand from this, people do understand importance of content marketing, but most of them are still this route - write content on trending topics for Google crawlers to rank better. Instead, they should follow this - write content for users, answer their issues and queries, share some analytical case studies in your field, etc..

Overall, this is a great effort from you to compile all this data into one post.

Waooo; finally the analysis of Moz Q&A is now live. I was waiting for this and now the wait is over. :)

First of all I really appreciate the effort that Moz team put in analyzing 11,555 questions. It was a challenging task. As per my personal experience what I have noticed is that mostly questions are technical SEO issues or On Page related.

Also agreed with the conclusion that “inbound marketing still hasn't put solid roots in the minds of search marketers, and despite what the biggest majority of the Moz community says publicly, it seems it's still thinking in terms of the old classic SEO.”

Thanks for this post. I found it very useful. Having just joined the Moz community, you have done the hard yards for me by providing critical information that has given me a fairly good sense of the nature of this community. I had to spend days doing this myself on other forums.

It's interesting that your research confirms two important marketing truths.

1. The 'newbie section' in any market is always the largest. There are always more people learning something for the first time. There could be exceptions. I'd be interested in hearing em.

2. People are usually searching for CURE rather than prevention. Hence the obsession with questions revolving around penalties.

Great stuff. Thanks again. I look forward to learning and sharing. Hopefully I can eke out some time within the next 24 hrs to complete my profile!

I really appreciate your efforts on digging this useful data. Perhaps, Rand won't be able to see top 100 questions but he can clearly see the positive and matured approach by the community members. By reading your both posts, I came to the conclusion that our community has become quite matured and sophisticated, they no longer asked some silly questions to you but ask some serious and important questions. As we can see from your insights, people are engaging with the latest SEO issues now.

That's an immense analysis Gianluca Fiorelli. To add one Question here: How much time does it take for a guy like you to write this kind of post? Also, how much time do you invest in getting these stats into your post? I'm concerned as i really aspire to do such analysis someday.

It takes a lot. Doing this research (that includes also the audit I presented in this previous post) took me 6/7 weeks of non-continuative work. You could say something between 40/50 hours, including the writing and editing the posts process.

The analysis phase (included the Wordle use for insights) took the biggest percentage of time.

Hi Gianluca, sorry if I looked rude, didnt mean to :) Sometimes I write and submit, but then when i re read i see that it can cause ambigiuity.. I really apologize for that.. as well, im in Italy so we re pretty close.

I just would have liked to understand if and how 2 different perspectives and analysis can bring to same or similar results.. You re right saying about Google within Wordle.. also the "how to" and "how do" observation its pretty simple to guess.

Thanks for confirming that both ways can be persecuted. That can lead then to further investigation in this sense :)

Thanks for your reply, and please axcept my apologies for been seen as rude.. that really wasnt the purpose. Sometimes i try to write in a "poetic form", but i see im not understood too well those times.. so i shoud change this attitude. Pardon.

Wow, that's some serious data analysis! The word clouds really help make sense of it all.

Although it's obvious from spending time on the site over the last few years, it's so strange that Yahoo and Bing are not mentioned at all (at least in the top questions). Where are people going to get SEO tips for those engines I wonder?

still no replies, where pride takes over research and analysis and does not lead to improvement.. oh if the world was a little different than that.. you woudnt find the same human vile pride even besides machines.. oh that emptiness of a man's soul trapped within

Hey Eugenio (I always look to the Moz profiles of those commenting me)! Even if it doesn't seem, I don't live permanently staring at Moz :-). As Keri wrote here below, I live in Spain, have a family to spend time with too or simply I was doing something else than sitting in front of a PC, and when you wrote your second comment I was quietly sleeping. So, please, try to be less rude next time and avoid to write comments like this one.

Said that, I really liked what you did, and that's something that I was hoping many more would have tried to do. In the post, in fact, I also wrote that my method can be surely refined and perfected.

A part the new insights, I liked how your sample was confirming my insights.

That Google is the most cited terms was clear. If you see the wordle's clouds you can see Google outstanding any other word, and when it is not present it is just because I eliminated for giving better visibility to more interesting terms.